Six passengers are in critical condition and being transported to nearby hospitals after a tour bus carrying 56 people rolled over about 20 kilometres south of Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway on Thursday afternoon.Adam Hopewell
/ Social Media

Six passengers are in critical condition and being transported to nearby hospitals after a tour bus carrying 56 people rolled over about 20 kilometres south of Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway on Thursday afternoon.Castanet
/ ...

Six passengers are in critical condition and being transported to nearby hospitals after a tour bus carrying 56 people rolled over about 20 kilometres south of Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway on Thursday afternoon.Adam Hopewell
/ Social media

Six passengers are in critical condition and being transported to nearby hospitals after a tour bus carrying 56 people rolled over about 20 kilometres south of Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway on Thursday afternoon.Adam Hopewell
/ Social media

Six passengers are in critical condition and being transported to nearby hospitals after a tour bus carrying 56 people rolled over about 20 kilometres south of Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway on Thursday afternoon.Adam Hopewell
/ Social media

Emergency crews respond after a tour bus rolled into a ditch Thursday afternoon on the Coquihalla Highway south of Merritt, ejecting multiple passengers and leaving all 56 people aboard with varying injuries.Sue Gordon
/ Special to the Vancouver Sun

Emergency crews respond after a tour bus rolled into a ditch Thursday afternoon on the Coquihalla Highway south of Merritt, ejecting multiple passengers and leaving all 56 people aboard with varying injuries.Sue Gordon
/ Special to the Vancouver Sun

Six passengers are in critical condition and being transported to nearby hospitals after a tour bus carrying 56 people rolled over about 20 kilometres south of Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway on Thursday afternoon.Adam Hopewell
/ Social Media

Traffic backed up after a tour bus rolled into a ditch Thursday afternoon on the Coquihalla Highway south of Merritt, ejecting multiple passengers and leaving all 56 people aboard with varying injuries.Sue Gordon
/ Special to the Vancouver Sun

Traffic backed up after a tour bus rolled into a ditch Thursday afternoon on the Coquihalla Highway south of Merritt, ejecting multiple passengers and leaving all 56 people aboard with varying injuries.Sue Gordon
/ Special to the Vancouver Sun

RCMP Sgt. Brian Nightingale said the dash-cam footage, captured by a truck travelling behind the bus, indicates speed was likely not a factor, leaving human error or mechanical failure as possible causes.

"It's more an issue that the driver drove into the centre median and then veered too hard trying to get onto the road," Nightingale said.

"We're doing mechanical (inspections) today on the bus, so that will rule out any kind of mechanical factors, like steering and braking and that kind of stuff."

Interior Health said passengers needing treatment were transported to hospitals in Kamloops and Kelowna. In addition to the patients with critical and serious injuries, the health authority

said 28 people had less serious non-life threatening injuries.

The passengers were on a tour organized by Super Vacation, a company based in Richmond, that describes itself as the largest Chinese tour operator in North America. The company has said the bus was returning to Vancouver from on a trip to the Rocky Mountains and was between Kamloops and Vancouver when it rolled over.

Company spokesman L. Lau said many of the passengers are from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, though he said some are from B.C. and elsewhere in Canada.

Lau said his company has been in touch with some of the patients and has been figuring out ways to provide assistance.

"We have been planning for everything right now,'' said Lau, who declined to give his full name. "Of course, some of the patients we can't see."

Lau said the bus was operated by Western Bus Lines, which he said is a "major local bus company with 35 years of experience."

Western Bus Lines, based in Kelowna, did not reply to repeated voice messages and emails.

"We are waiting for the police report," Lau said.

Abraham Lin, director of consular services for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vancouver, said his office had confirmed that two of the patients are Taiwanese nationals, a 20-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman.

"They are just studying for the summer and they joined the bus tour for the Rocky Mountains," Lin said.

Lin said his office had been in touch with one of the Taiwanese passengers and had contacted the other's parents in Taiwan.

Neither the Chinese embassy in Ottawa nor the consulate in Vancouver could be immediately reached.

Photos from the scene on Thursday showed the white bus upright,with visible damage to its side and the Western Bus Lines logo mostly scraped off. Passengers and emergency workers could be seen standing alongside the bus, with debris strewn about the road.

Everyone on the bus suffered "varying degrees" of injury when the southbound bus crashed around 3 p.m. on the Coquihalla Highway.

Photos of the bus posted to social media show people crowded around blown-out windows.

"There was blood all over the bus and people under the bus," said student Adam Hopewell, who was on a road trip to Vancouver with his friend, stepdad and mother when they arrived at the scene of the crash.

"It looked like just the bus (was involved in the accident), but there was a big semi parked probably 20 feet back from the bus," Hopewell said. "We saw the helicopters (coming) when we were driving to Vancouver."

A family of American tourists recalls screaming out for each other through a mess of bloodied bodies after the chartered bus rolled.

Nineteen-year-old Janice Wong says she was napping Thursday afternoon on the way to Vancouver when her body was thrown against the sides of the bus and then flung from the vehicle, landing in a heap of injured passengers.

Wong was on a trip with her parents, and she says she immediately feared they could be dead.

But there were no fatalities.

Wong's 56-year-old mother was airlifted with serious injuries to Kelowna General Hospital, while Wong and her father were treated in nearby Merritt.

Daniel Parsons was on his way home from work when he happened upon the scene. Police and paramedics were already there and two school buses had been brought in to help with the injured.

"You could see the bus, it was right off the side of the highway and it looked like it had rolled over,'' Parsons said. "There was just a pile of people all along the side of the bus receiving medical assistance and you could see some blood on the side of the bus. It was a pretty bad scene for sure. I haven't seen one like that."

He said the crash appeared to happen along a slight curve in the highway.

Gibbons, Alta., resident Kat Woycechowsky was driving south of Merritt with her boyfriend to visit her in-laws in Surrey when they noticed the bus speed past them down a hill going at least 125 km/h.

"We had to actually go about 140 km/h to pass it going up (the next hill)," Woycechowsky said. "And that's when my boyfriend looked at me, he said, 'for a bus going that fast — on a coach bus — that's very unsafe. I feel for those people on that bus.'"

At the start of this summer the B.C. government boosted speed limits from 110 to 120 kilometres per hour on the Coquihalla as well as other stretches of rural provincial highway on Vancouver Island and in the Fraser Valley.

At the time, Transportation Minister Todd Stone said several months of public consultation and engineering reviews justified hiking limits despite objections from the RCMP and the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police that the higher speeds would increase the number of crashes.

Super Vacation's website says the company was established in 1981 in Los Angeles by Helen Koo.

The company has 15 branches and operates an office in Richmond. It employs more than 300 staff and owns at least 30 deluxe tour coaches in Canada and the United States. It says it operates more than 150 monthly tours and serves more than 150,000 customers every year.

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